I don't have a title yet, but here's the idea: I'm making a bootleg version of the Legend of Zelda for a mid-eighties PC. I'm making the game from scratch with vintage-era tools (viz. Turbo C 2.01), with the intention that it run on vintage-era hardware. (Right now I'm running it in DOSBox.)

Video:

I'm using only 320x200 CGA graphics, which presents some interesting constraints. The main one is color: the CGA adapter supports only 4 colors at a time, from a static set of palettes--only four palettes in all, I think. I was tempted to go with the classic black/cyan/magenta/white palette (as seen in Karateka, Sokoban, Loderunner, etc.) but this green/yellow/red/black palette works better with the subject matter, I think.

The video shows pretty clearly that I'm having some flicker problems... I've never hacked this close on graphics hardware before, and CGA is kind of a beast. (4 pixels to a byte, even-numbered lines mapped to a different memory area than odd-numbered lines, etc.) So, uh, if anyone has any performance tips, I'm all ears.

As you can probably tell, I've mostly just been wading through the technical aspects of this project (it's really my first big project in C)... so I haven't even had time to give any thought to actually, you know, game design. There's still a lot of work to do, more than I can probably finish in two and a half weeks, so this one might end up in the "unfinished" pile. We'll see. But I've had a lot of fun making what I have so far.

That's totally, massively cool. I precisely loved this CGA palette, that was too rare.Do you have some sort of engine / libraries always written ?Do you compile into dos/box ? or cross compile from windows ?What where the graphics made with ? Deluxe Paint into DosBox ?

I was tempted to go with the classic black/cyan/magenta/white palette (as seen in Karateka, Sokoban, Loderunner, etc.) but this green/yellow/red/black palette works better with the subject matter, I think.

That's totally, massively cool. I precisely loved this CGA palette, that was too rare.Do you have some sort of engine / libraries always written ?Do you compile into dos/box ? or cross compile from windows ?What where the graphics made with ? Deluxe Paint into DosBox ?

Man, this is so exciting !

I'm writing the "engine"--if you can call it that--from scratch for the compo. All of the development work is being done in OS X, but then I have a DOSBox window open to do the Turbo C compilation. Using a vintage graphics program like Deluxe Paint is probably a good idea... so far I've been relying on Pixen.